Marketing strategy. Who said, “don’t sweat the small stuff?”

As your company grows, the lines between traditional marketing, online marketing, sales and product marketing will naturally begin to blur. Fighting any crossover or rejecting natural coexistence will have a negative effect on future marketing efforts and revenue. Assuming you have exhausted all other revenue channels for finding new “huge wins,” growth will have to come from improving current channels. While there may be some big improvements, most revenue increases will come from many smaller ones. Don’t be discouraged, small improvements can add up to huge revenue gains.

As changes occur, making sure your teams work together is of utmost importance. Disagreements aside, as long as everyone focuses on the same end goal—making a great product, giving customers a great user experience and increasing conversions—you will succeed.

Everyone’s website is different, customers are different, and products or services are different. Here are a few things to think about as you grow:

Do you really know who your customers are?
Use analytics, your product marketing team and customer surveys to create personas. Using this information in your marketing collateral will allow you to match features and benefits to potential customer’s specific pain points.

Site testing
The key is to set up a testing schedule and continually test. Do not be discouraged if you end up with tests that do not increase conversions. Notice I did not use the term “failures.” If a test does not do well, it is not a failure. You now know what not to do; take note, and move on to the next test. A simple test you can start with is changing button colors or the text in the button. We have seen increases in conversion rates completing these tests and they do not take up much time or resources.

Paid search ad and landing page testing
Again, test test test! Google makes it very easy to test ads within the Adwords interface. Don’t just test click thru rates, test conversions and revenue as well. Just because an ad or landing page has a higher click thru rate, does not mean it will bring in higher conversions and revenue.

Improve content on your site
Is the content on your site informative? Always write informative content for your specific visitors, not for the search engine bots. This will not only help with conversions, but you will be seen as a resource and most likely see increases in your website rankings as well from others linking to your informative content.

Is your website layout easy to read and easy navigate?
Can visitors easily find the information they need? Does the site look current and professional? Most importantly, do visitors know what to do once they are on your site? Try UserTesting.com (we are not affiliated with them in any way). For $39, you can have someone visit your site and answer questions you may have. Start with 3 and see what happens. Everything is recorded and sent to you. Have someone go to your site, look at your home page for 5 seconds and then have them answer “what do we do and what action do we want you to take?” You will be very surprised at the answers.

Take action
One final note: ideas to improve your site are meaningless without action. Start slow, set a schedule, and the main thing, start now!

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. - Mark Twain

About the Author

Al Scillitani is a Sr. web marketing and optimization manager at Citrix with more than 15 years of experience in people management and marketing strategy in areas, such as paid search, SEO, email, affiliate, demand generation and site optimization.